Publications on Tax Expenditures

Each year the Joint Committee Staff publishes a report on Tax Expenditures for the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance. The report also is submitted to the House and Senate Committees on Budget. Each report contains a discussion of the concept of tax expenditures, identification of new tax expenditures enacted into law, a general explanation on how the Staff measures tax expenditures, estimates of tax expenditures, and distributions of selected individual tax expenditures by income class.

In general, tax expenditures include any reductions in income tax liabilities that result from special tax provisions or regulations that provide tax benefits to particular taxpayers. Importantly, a tax expenditure estimate is not the same as a revenue estimate. Unlike revenue estimates, tax expenditure estimates do not incorporate any behavioral response of taxpayers or changes in the timing of tax payments.